“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” -Niels Bohr

What’s going to happen next? It’s perhaps the most important thing to know if we want to be prepared for practically anything in our lives. And without even thinking about it, most of us are actually very good at this in a huge number of aspects of our lives. For example…

Image credit: Crazy Adventures in Parenting.

I was hungry at work today, and I was prepared for it. Somehow, I knew that I was going to need food throughout the course of the day, and so I was prepared for it by bringing food from home. This is an incredibly mundane prediction, but think about it for a moment: how did I know I was going to be hungry?

In my case, it’s because I’ve been in this situation before: thousands upon thousands of times before, in fact. Every day when I wake up, I get hungry after a certain amount of time. Perhaps today would have been different; perhaps it would have been the first time in many years where I simply wasn’t hungry during the day. But I was so certain I would get hungry that I didn’t even stop to consider the possibility that I wouldn’t; I know from my own past experience that I’d get hungry, and therefore I planned accordingly.

Image credit: Johnny Nichols, 2008.

This is a fabulous example of a pre-scientific prediction! I’ve taken information from very, very similar situations that I’ve experienced before, I know — looking back — how those previous situations turned out, and so I can infer how this current situation is likely to turn out. This is something we do all the time in our lives, and something we’ve done frequently throughout history. The phrase Red Sky at Night, Sailor’s Delight didn’t come about because we understood the science behind the next day’s weather and the properties of the atmosphere the night before, it came about because when we observed phenomenon A (the red sky at night), it was very often followed by phenomenon B (good sailing weather the next day).

We use this all the time in our lives: it’s why we have confidence that the next untested apple we eat will be delicious and not poisonous (even though the occasional apple is poisonous), that our house hasn’t burned down when we go to the store (although sometimes houses do burn down when you’re at the store), and that the store you’re going to will have apples to sell you when you go (even though they’re sometimes out of apples).

Image credit: screenshot from weather.com (L) and the Old Farmers' Almanac (R).

Sometimes, this type of pre-scientific prediction is the best we can do. If we can make this into a truly scientific prediction, we stand to do much better, but it’s a much more difficult task. A truly scientific prediction requires the following three things:

that the scientific theory that governs your phenomenon is completely understood,

the conditions that will affect the possible outcome(s) are known and understood in their entirety, and

that you have enough computing power to figure out what the outcome is going to be.

In addition, because measurements are imperfect (and sometimes physical laws aren’t 100% predictive), you are also going to have a quantifiable uncertainty associated with your scientific prediction.

For some physical systems, the uncertainties can be so small that a prediction will be incredibly powerful; we know that on February 15th, 2013, a 45-meter wide asteroid will miss the Earth by only about 20,000 kilometers. Yet, the law of gravity is so well-known and the asteroid’s properties and trajectory is so well known that we can state with great confidence that there is absolutely a 0% chance that this asteroid will hit the Earth.

In other cases — like meteorology — the uncertainties are very large. It’s why we can’t predict with very much certainty whether Hurricane Sandy will wind up striking New York with strong winds, weak winds, or not at all.

We can speak intelligently about what the outcome will be in terms of probabilities and uncertainties, but this also requires a few things that are far from given:

Scientists who can communicate these results clearly and effectively,

A media / government that can understand that information, make reasonable and effective policies based on that information, and communicate these results to the populace, and

A populace that’s scientifically literate enough to understand what’s communicated to them and act in accordance with those recommendations.

This ought to be one of the main goals of science, as it’s one of the most important services that science can perform for a society. Sometimes statistically unlikely things happen, sometimes we’re unprepared for a disaster when it does happen, sometimes what seemed like a reasonable policy turns out to be ineffective, and sometimes people simply don’t listen. Unfortunately, when the wrong combinations of those things happen, people wind up dead.

Image credit: collapsed houses in the Village of Onna, Italy, photo by REUTERS/Max Rossi.

The scientific community tells us there is no danger, because there is an ongoing discharge of energy. The situation looks favourable.

Which, of course, is not what the scientists said at all. The scientists reached the conclusion that the observed tremors could not help predict whether there would be a major quake, information that they never communicated to the general public.

Image credit: AP Photo / Pier Paolo Cito.

Because of the quake, 309 people were killed. It truly was a scene of horror, with tragic results. Unfortunately, this is what often happens when there’s a natural disaster.

Was it a poor job of science communication? Yes, on the part of the scientists, and in particular on the part of the civil protection official, Bernardo De Bernardinis, who added that citizens should go have a glass of wine. But realistically, recommending evacuation based on what was observed would have been absurd; some natural phenomena are simply presently beyond the reach of science.

In other words, neither the occurrence nor the severity of this disaster could have been predicted. Which is why the following is all the more absurd.

Image credit: CNN.com.

The government official (De Bernardinis) as well assix Italian Seismologists were sentenced for manslaughter in connection with the L’Aquila earthquake. Now, Italian justice may be as phantasmal as an American kangaroo, but this is just absurd. It’s science’s job to use we know to predict — to the best of science’s abilities — what’s going to happen next, along with probabilities and uncertainties. These scientists did their job, and they did their job adequately well, if not spectacularly.

You do the world a disservice when you scapegoat scientists for a disaster they could not predict and an incompetent government official they could not control. We now live in a world where we jail scientists for failing to clean up the government’s miscommunication about a disaster they could not predict, while we simultaneously accuse them of fear-mongering for the impending disasters that good science does predict.

Image credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center.

If you want to know what’s going to happen in the future with any sort of accuracy, you need science. It’s the only thing that’s ever worked, and the more we do it, the better we get at it. This means we need to make the world safe for scientists to do science, we need to treat the science being done with the respect it deserves, and we need to improve and encourage communication between scientists and the public.

Remember, somewhere, right now, a scientist is hard at work trying to understand how some part of this Universe works for the sole purpose of trying to protect you from what are otherwise completely unpredictable natural disasters.

Comments

Science gets into trouble the minute they actually go beyond the ‘science’ per sey and delve into the public arena. i’m around these guy and gals everyday, believe me, for the most part, the smartest of the bunch are no where near capable of communicating effectively, present blogger excepted—ethan is one of the best i’ve seen online or anywhere, I commend you sir. but getting back to what i was trying to say, i think scientists, for the most part, should stick to making observations and determining this or that based on the data they see (to put it simply), they should not be walked out to brief a sometimes scared public about the what they have interpreted. brief your public officials, thats what they are supposed to do, if they can’t do it then vote them out of office and demand accountability or communication skills from the new guy/gal. its when scientists turn into some sort of advocacy for a certain subject that gets me riled up. again, make your observations, make determinations based on your observations, and generally shut the **** up after that. just my 2 cents.

You might want to read to Wiki-page on this disaster, and than you get to know some interesting facts about history, predicting, and realizing that those convicted scientists were no good, perhaps nice people, yes, but not good scientists.

Earthquakes mark the history of L’Aquila, a city built on the bed of an ancient lake, providing a soil structure that amplifies seismic waves. The city was struck by earthquakes in 1315, 1349, 1452, 1501, 1646, 1703, and 1706. The earthquake of February 1703, which caused devastation across much of central Italy, largely destroyed the city and killed around 5,000 people.

Italian laboratory technician Giampaolo Giuliani predicted a major earthquake on Italian television a month before, after measuring increased levels of radon emitted from the ground. He was accused of being alarmist by the Director of the Civil Defence, Guido Bertolaso, and forced to remove his findings from the Internet.

If they had any common sense, they would have warned the people but no, nobody wants to ‘scare’ the public.

… same goes for the LHC, a 100 000 times hotter than the heart of the Sun, and a frequency & density that is 10^9 higher than cosmic ray collisions in Nature, … but no it’s all safe.

The most sad fact of this case and for Science, was that a little guy had to withdraw his conclusions due to peer pressure. Just like for the LHC, I don’t see anyone getting a paper published on it due to the same peer pressure. Can you imagine one person saying that this large experiment isn’t safe jeopardizing this whole project, because of a wild guess. I don’t see him or her getting a chance to make a career in particle physics ever.

This disaster is a very clear case of how scientists turn their heads away because of peer pressure, and very sad they for science in general.

I want just to add some context to the inaccurate statements by De Bernardinis: he did sound too reassuring, but you must understand what happened in the weeks before the quake. When De Bernardinis talked about “no danger “, he added “I said it to the mayor of Sulmona”; he was reassuring the people of Sulmona, a city 25 miles from L’Aquila. Why Sulmona? Because in those weeks a crackpot of the I-can-predict-earthquakes variety was writing on the web and going around Sulmona with loudspeakers, announcing that a strong earthquake was going to happen in Sulmona the next day (the earthquake in L’Aquila occurred a week later); this played a part in motivating the Commission to try and calm down the panicked population.
In that interview, De Bernardinis encouraged to stay attentive but not ansious, and the wine quip was prompted by a journalist remark, “Meanwhile we drink a glass of wine”, to which the answer “Absolutely, a Montepulciano”.

P.S.: “to use we know to predict” should be “to use what we know to predict”.

Who would want to be a seismologist in Italy now? Anti-science has sure done its job this time. The idea of sentencing scientists with manslaughter for an earthquake is just the sort of thing that’ll throw us back into the dark ages. Nice article!

“Because in those weeks a crackpot of the I-can-predict-earthquakes variety was writing on the web …”

He was not just some kind of crackpot:

Giampaolo Giuliani

From 1971 to 1984 he was technical research in astrophysics at the Observatory of Campo Imperatore, employee IAS (Institute of Astrophysics Frascati), from 1984 to 1990 to ‘ Astronomical Observatory of Campo Imperatore ( AQ ).

He worked at the National Laboratories of Gran Sasso of ‘National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) as a non-graduate technical assistant of the Institute of Physics of Interplanetary Space of Turin , one of the twenty structures of ‘ National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF ) . He participated in the first experiment EAS-TOP and then experiment Large Volume Detector (LVD) for the detection of neutrinos produced by stellar gravitational collapse . He is now retired.

According to the expert, incorrect prediction “can be even more damaging that a real earthquake” because of the panic this can create and the effect it can have on the economy and property values in the area.

Those people didn’t care about real safety, they only cared for their own property values and their job. It’s good that they are in jail now.

““Because in those weeks a crackpot of the I-can-predict-earthquakes variety was writing on the web …”

He was not just some kind of crackpot:”

Ooooh, bad move. Quote all of his statement, chelle, dear:

“Because in those weeks a crackpot of the I-can-predict-earthquakes variety was writing on the web and going around Sulmona with loudspeakers, announcing that a strong earthquake was going to happen in Sulmona the next day”

Yes I have at times found myself standing in RAIN where and when there was suppose to be SUNSHINE.

Whether YOU blame it on the WEATHER, the WEATHER CHANNEL, the WEATHER MAN, the SCIENTISTS, some UNAUTHORIZED CLIMATE EXPERIMENT, the POLITICIANS, , the SINS OF PEOPLE, YOURSELF or… tells a lot about YOU.

I personally blame the earthquake in Italy on the increasing number of tourists in Italy; all those people have shifted the tectonic plates ever so slightly and well they just all snore at the same time in the middle of the night (1:05 a.m. local time) and disaster is the result. It could happen anywhere. Look at the statistics.

Balderdash! Michael Mann’s computer models quite confidently predict the Earth’s temperature fifty years from now, and under a variety of assumptions about our carbon dioxide emissions no less. Right? Of course I’m right. Environmental extremists routinely predict the future catastrophes if their agenda is not enacted, and the EPA would not be framing its regulatory agenda around these predictions if there was any uncertainty in their reliability. Right again? Of course I’m right again. The central point of this article is so much balderdash.

And damn right people want retribution, if those scientist had acted properly, than people would have gotten out of their houses; but no, instead they laughed all dangers away. And the way the Science community is now acting towards Giuliani is pure arrogance, people like ‘Atom’ want to picture him as the ‘crackpot’ that was the cause of it all, while he was correct. Scientists all over the world should be ashamed for how these scientists in Italy acted; instead of speaking of an anti-science plot, and picturing those Italians that lost family and friends as idiots, this is just sad.

The same goes for the LHC where you have temperatures that are 100.000 times hotter than the heart of the Sun, and a frequency & density level that is 1.000.000.000 higher than Cosmic ray collisions in nature, … everybody with some sense knows that this is a tricky experiment, but all safety arguments are laughed away. Well good luck!

“quite confidently predict the Earth’s temperature fifty years from now, and under a variety of assumptions about our carbon dioxide emissions no less. Right?”

Right. Though you neglect to say that there is also an error bar on it.

“Right again? Of course I’m right again.”

Yup, right again, though to neglect to mention that Hansen’s model results published in 1988 were within a whisker of the right value for sensitvity to CO2: he got 3.4 when a value of 3.2 C per doubling of CO2 would have been spot on.

I think at least part of the problem was the government took the opportunity to use the 6 scientist and the govt spokesman as scapegoats for their lack of planning and investment. The town is in a known active earthquake area with a long history of serious earthquakes, yet there seems to have been no effort to reinforce at-risk buildings or enforce earthquake-proof building codes.

You didn’t read the article but yet you keep on trashing the guy. What’s the use.

“For several days, Giuliani had been watching with mounting anxiety as his four radometer stations, placed in and around L’Aquila, showed very high and rising levels of radon gas emissions from the ground. By Sunday 5 April, he was convinced that within 24 hours there would be a quake – but he could not raise a public alarm. He was under an injunction, served a week earlier, that forbade him to do so on the grounds that his predictions would spread unfounded panic.

… and here is an other of you nonsensical comments, because you don’t read what others post, yet you keep on insulting others. You’re no better than those criminal Italian scientist who waved everything away with a stupid joke.

“people like ‘Atom’ want to picture him as the ‘crackpot’ that was the cause of it all,”

Jeez, what a retard you are. No, atom pictures him as a crackpot NOT the cause of it all.”

This was in the article he linked to:

“To me, this is a perfect storm. There was a crank stirring up panic, and the best scientific information available suggested that the risk of a major quake was low …”

I know for a fact that you are paranoid, because I am not a couple, nor have I ever used a sockpuppet name here, both are delusions of yours. You have developed some kind of obsession about people being anti-science.

Sure I do question the fact if making the most intense fire in our Milky Way couldn’t combust surrounding matter, but I don’t do this because I believe people want to do this on purpose to cause harm, but due to genuine ignorance that pops up on a regular basis (perfect storm). Just like the ignorance of those Italian scientists that was the cause of people losing their loved ones. They laughed all troubles away just like how you laugh the issues about your mental health away. Anyway, you are just an idiot; but they had a serious responsibility and they failed badly.

Chelle, stop with LHC and combustion already, or take it to the post, you know which. Do we have to play this game every time Ethan post’s something. Go sit in the van with speakers and drive around your home town, or whatever. Just stop writting about it here once and for all!

You just didn’t get it, now did you? Giuliani didn’t drove around with speakers, he made a phone call to the mayor of that other town who organized this. He is not the crank that people want to make of him. Show some respect for this guy, who was actually making measurements, stop being so ignorant.

Some time ago on another post you made a comment claiming a frog thrown into a pan of hot water would jump out, but one in a pan of slowly heated hot water would not notice it was cooking until it was too late. I told you this was apocryphal and straight from the plot of Dante’s Peak, which you said you had never seen. You really should watch it. In fact, swap volcano for earthquake, and apart from the dastardly scientist getting his comeuppance at the hands of the natural disaster he denied was going to happen instead of at the hands of the legal system, you could have written the plot.

But congratulations are due you for staying completely on post for once, and illustrating Ethan’s point perfectly. You approach everything thinking in a way that has been totally appropriate through most of human evolution. In an environment where everybody is almost 100% ignorant of how the world really works, all you have to go on is trust in the individuals deemed to be the wisest. Even if they claimed sacrificing your youngest child to the gods of the ground was the only way to stop the earth shaking again and yet it still shook, they could then claim it would have shook even more were it not for your sacrifice. Because without science you have no idea of what would have happened without that sacrifice, so you can only ever look at one side of the equation.

There is always a cost (in the broadest sense) and benefit to any course of action, and humanity as a whole is more and more in a position to measure those. There will always be room to argue how much chalk is equivalent to a pound of cheese, but this must be done on the basis of evidence. Scientists and especially those they advise have to use their judgement. If people live in an area prone to earthquakes, how much does the probability of an earthquake have to increase before they are evacuated? Because whether you like it or not, there is a cost to that evacuation. And it’s not just financial. If you evacuate a town every time a crank predicts its destruction, then once a there is real evidence of an earthquake, the people may well say, “oh no not again”, and will stay where they are die. Whose fault would that be? Would you expect the cranks to be prosecuted after the event in such a case? If so can I suggest you put Dr Andrew Wakefield at the top of your hit list. He has been responsible for the killing and maiming more children over the last decade than all but the worst of oppressive regimes.

No Chelle it is not nonsense. What you seem to be incapable of recognising is it is perfectly possible for the scientists to say the risk of an earthquake is not significant enought to advise evacuation, and still be correct even if the earthquake subsequently occurs.

I have no mental issues. In contrast one has to only scroll up a little and check what type of Jekyll & Hyde personality you have:

You just won’t shut the fuck up aboult LHC and when called on it, segue ito something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT in the hope that it would be forgotten.
You’re just a tired sadsack troll whining on about “the establishmen” wot have got it in for ya.
Fuck right off.

Well, it’s a shame that these scientists are being jailed for a natural disaster. Even if the scientists had given the facts for the likelihood of an earthquake of the magnitude that had followed, the majority would have remained within L’Aquila due to the low probability of it actually taking place. Science is not perfection and the combination of some politician’s remarks and hindsight does not always help uncover the facts. It’s understandable for these people to want retribution, but the Italian courts using these scientists as scapegoats does not bring about justice.
Unfortunately some like Chelle will always blame them, and will refute any amount evidence that may say otherwise, so there is no point in engaging people like that in this type of conversation.

Interestingly, with Sandy about to hit NYC right now, the local news is filled with coverage. They were just interviewing a lady who is disobeying mandatory evacuation orders, because she evacuated for Irene last year, and it wasn’t that bad.

THAT is the problem with giving evacuation orders for 2% events. The Italian court is clearly wrong.

Unfortunately some like Chelle will always blame them, and will refute any amount evidence that may say otherwise,

Look this is what Ethan said himself:

“Was it a poor job of science communication? Yes, on the part of the scientists”

And these people were responsible for good communication, that was their job, and they failed. It was not about organising evacuations, it was about giving a clear assessment. If it wasn’t for these scientist people would have been more cautious.

Science should learn an important lesson here, but clearly some don’t want to realise that a deadly mistake was made. And some even want to blame someone who was warning people about the situation. Grow up and take responsibility for your own wrongdoings, it is not all kids play.

Technically not all American kangaroos are phantoms. There is a resident population of feral Rock Wallabies on the island of Oahu in Hawaii…a product of an accidental escape in the 50’s. Estimated to number 100 individuals, sightings are rare but consistent. Since Hawaii is part of the United States and wallabies are technically Kangaroos (or the other way around)…I’d say American Kangaroos aren’t always phantoms.

Chelle you have a knack of quote mining the one phrase which supports (or rather the one which you chose to interpret as supporting) your stance, whilst ignoring everything else. You quote Ethan on “Was it a poor job of science communication?”, but in his next sentence he says “But realistically, recommending evacuation based on what was observed would have been absurd;” So what exactly was the “deadly mistake”? The only lesson I can see is “don’t be a scientist in Italy”

What would be your criteria for ordering an evacuation if you were the Chief Geologist for the San Fransisco Bay area? It seems to me your strategy would be “Look for a crank who agrees with me and ask his advice. Because if there is the slightest chance of a earthquake, one of the world’s greatest centres of technological innovation has to grind to a halt”

Everybody in the Bay area, knows that one day a big shock can come, it is also the case in Japan. So I don’t think that any scientists over there would say to sit back and relax when you just had two small earthquakes, but to be very cautious. And certainly no scientist will do so in the future after this verdict, that’s why I find it a good thing. Perhaps the sentence is too much and should be reduced after one year, and they shouldn’t pay for the damages … but some people have lost family and friends forever, due their poor communication.

Chelle you are sidestepping the issue. “They may have been criticised by the court for being “falsely reassuring””, but the only people knowledgeable enough to make that judgement are the world’s seismological experts, especially those with local knowledge, probably some of the six scientists involved.

In the real world there are no certainties. In this case, 40,000 people were made homeless. To keep it simple let’s say that is 40% of those in the affected area, and the earthquake was expected in an area ten times larger, so 1 million people deemed at risk, of which about 300 died, so about a 3500:1 risk of dying. Lets add the chance of an earthquake being assessed at about 3% in the next 10 days and we are back to 1 in a million per person per day. Would that risk cause you to significantly change your behaviour if you had lived in the region? Is so, what risk would you ignore and advise others to do likewise? And how do you manage to live if you feel the need to always avoid a risk like that? (For comparison, it is about the same as the risk of dying on a seventy five minute commercial flight) It may even be safer to stay than risk driving out of the earthquake zone in the company of Italian drivers on Italian mountain roads!

Are you insane, their advice was the worst, they could have given. Even Ethan said clearly:

“Was it a poor job of science communication? Yes

If you ever worked for a big company you know that they don’t joke about safety, risk is never taken lighthearted, and this is what they did. These people who were responsible to communicate about the risks failed miserably. The evidence showed clearly to be on the look out, and not to sit back and relax.

“But the unreasonable person would shift the goalposts, bring up a new argument, point to some misinterpreted piece of evidence, etc., in some never-ending game of cat-and-mouse.
…
Because from here on out, you are no longer free to promote your own, personal, anti-scientific screed here. Not on this blog, not on any old posts, not on any new posts.
…
If you said your piece of mind and were properly informed, and you continue to plow ahead and promote your anti-scientific nonsense, you get one warning to take it to this page.”

Chelle is confusing stupidity (bad judgment), mis-communimcation (bad advice), and slight negligence with criminal acts. You don’t go to jail for those things. Do you get fired? Absolutely… but prison? It’s borderline delusional to think that. If I leave a child in a hot car and that child dies is that negligence? Yes… is it criminal and should I go to jail for my stupidity? Absolutely not…

There’s a great discussion over at Professor Matt Strassler’s blog about all this. I think his take on it is right on.

Chelle, still you refuse to say exactly where they went wrong exactly what you would have done differently were you one of them. At what expected number of deaths per million people would you move the advice from “Carry on as normal” to “Sleep away from buildings”, and at what level escalate to “Leave the area”? That is the judgement call the scientists had to make, and if you can’t say where you would draw the lines, you are in no position to assess the judgement of others.

I would have said, to check your building, find a safe place to sleep cause there is a 2% chance that it a big quake might come. The same things that is being said in areas where there are hurricanes, every year.

—

Aquanerd,

The question is how high do you want to set standards. It makes me think of the Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster where 30 people died because the captain sailed too close to the cliffs. I had a discussion with my nephew who has been many years 1st on giant oil tankers, and who supported the captain because he’s knows that from big ships sailing next to the coast you hardly get to see a thing; thus the captain probably sailed so close to please his passengers he explained to me, so they would get a nice view. He said that the captain only wanted to do good for is passengers, and he felt sorry for him, colleagues stick together. This drama is similar as the case with these scientists; they only wanted to do good for the people, and comfort them saying that nothing bad would happen. Well the great danger is wanting to please others, and if you don’t set standards or penalties high enough people will always be attracted to lower safety standards, just to try to please others, that’s the big problem; and it is probably why these scientists failed badly, and the cost of lives was so high. Wanting to do good sometimes does more bad than anything else.

Sure 6 years is far too high, but regarding their position and the lives that were lost, I believe that one year might be in order, just so everybody knows that the job of safety adviser should not be taken lightly, and you should stand above politics. And yes for the people that lose a kid out of their own stupidity, they are indeed already punished enough.

“I would have said, to check your building, find a safe place to sleep cause there is a 2% chance that it a big quake might come”

So you still avoid answering. If a 2% risk per day merits a warning, do you then think a 20% chance per day would merit evacuation, and perhaps a 0.2% chance means just carry on?

But even if you can answer that question you are still left with the problem of deciding whether you are facing the 0.2% risk or the 20% risk. Only the expert consensus can determine that risk with any accuracy. And the earthquake actually happening will not make that risk assessment wrong, even if it was less that 0.2%. That is fundamental to the Science Of Predicting The Future

That thread was specifically placed there — along with the comment policy with which you are well-acquainted — to prevent the derailing of topical discussions.

When I see you engage in behavior like this I seriously wonder if you are trying to goad me into banning you from this site. I don’t want an answer; I want you to — now and forever — cease commenting on any thread once you are asked to move your future comments to the place designated for them. This policy applies to everyone, and so far you have been the only one to continually violate it.

” you are still left with the problem of deciding whether you are facing the 0.2% risk or the 20% risk. Only the expert consensus can determine that risk with any accuracy”

Does he realise that 20% is 1 chance in 5? All the statistics are there, it has very little to do with consensus. The moment the frequency goes up, the higher the risk becomes. DavidL you should read this article I linked to earlier on:

“Indeed, what the government official had told the press turned out to be completely wrong. The discharge of energy isn’t a sign of decreased risk. It’s an alarm bell. In normal times, the statistical risk of a major earthquake in a given week along a fault-line like that in Aquila is something like one in 100,000, according to Thomas Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center at the University of Southern California and the author of a report on the Aquila quake commissioned by the Italian government. But when the ground starts to shake frequently, as it did before the major tremor struck, the chance soars that a disaster is on its way.” http://world.time.com/2012/10/24/the-aquila-earthquake-verdict-where-the-guilt-may-really-lie/

Ethan, of course Chelle is trying to goad you into banning them, because that would be “persecution” and improve their crackpot street cred. I appreciate you bending over backwards to accommodate alternative hypothesis. Such is good science.

I also appreciate you bending over backwards to say that there was poor science communication when a bureaucrat translated “insufficient data for a prediction” to “no danger”. Even though it is ridiculous to assign legal liability to the scientists, it is nevertheless important to recognize when things could have been done better.

At what expected number of deaths per million people would you move the advice from “Carry on as normal” to “Sleep away from buildings”, and at what level escalate to “Leave the area”? That is the judgement call the scientists had to make,

Maybe it works differently in Italy, but in the US that is exactly the sort of judgement call scientific advisors to the government don’t make. A probability does not dictate a policy response. It may suggest one or support one, but ultimately its up to the people, as represented by their government, to decide how much risk to accept. Take Sandy as a more recent example: the role of meteorologists is to give the government their best informed estimate about path, wind speed, wave height, etc. That is the science part of hurrican response.That is where their expertise lies. But its up to government – not scientists – to decide whether 60mph winds mean evacuate or 80mph winds mean evacuate. That’s a policy decision and relies on a lot more factors than just the storm physics. Its exactly the sort of decision that should be made by an elected official – and not a scientist – precisely because they are elected, and so (i) have been democratically chosen by the people to make such decisions, and (ii) can be held responsible for their policy decisions via future election.

I completely agree eric. I was a little imprecise in my language, trying to get Chelle to acknowledge the issues involved. The “system” makes that call. I would expect the recommended course of action to be a political decision anywhere in the world, based on the best scientific advice.

The scientists would only be negligent if they predicted a low risk based on data that a consensus of experts would have assessed as far higher risk. Chelle seemed think that scientists who predict only a 2% chance of an earthquake are automatically negligent if that earthquake actually occurs, and any attempt to justify their actions is after the event is just them bullshitting their way out of a hole. Classic projection of her evidence free world. The discredited Oracle must pay.

Before we build technologies that can alter nature, like that of controlling space-time, building global weather control system… we need a method of preventing corporations, both declared and undeclared [like the Bush/Cheney/Saudi/BinLadin Group/al-Qaeda (literally means the Corporation in Arabic)] to prevent disasterous results. The Corporation presently institutes suicide bombing to create political unrest so that the nations national resources are stolen by The Corporation like they are doing in Iraq (Iraq effectively gets nothing for the oil taken from them).

Not one major soft target of The Corporation has EVER been attacked by al-Qaeda (al Quida). Not one oil pipeline, top investor, related family, oil tanker, executive. Bin Laden would have been frozen and a forensic pathologist would have recovered a great deal of intelligence from his body. Bin Laden in part of The Corporation. His father and brother were both close associates of the Bush family. They were both killed in accidents near the Bush home; 10 years apart.

You might find my own book “Probing the Future: the art and science of prediction” (Booklocker.com) entertaining. IT discusses some of mankind’s attempts to predict the future through the ages, including some famously bad predictions, and then examines the scientific basis for why it can be so difficult to make reliable predictions of the future state of complex dynamical systems.